Art
Moving Through Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye
PARIS — I tend to prefer my European gesamtkunstwerk interior spaces lush, flamboyantly mannerist, funny, obscurantist, or noisy.
Joseph Nechvatal
Art
Jackson Pollock's Renaissance Connection
FLORENCE, Italy — The city of Florence is paying homage to Jackson Pollock, well-known for his all-over syncretistic paintings, by connecting his work to that of Michelangelo’s.
Art
Inside the Paris Home of a Founding Father of Electronic Music
PARIS — Pierre Henry, aged father of electronic music, lives in a small house that also serves as his studio, in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris. I recently went there with a small group of people to hear one of his magnificent musique concrète concerts that he performs live from his studio mixi
Art
Henri Langlois: Remembering a Titan of French Cinema
PARIS — With the ubiquity of cinema today — in airplanes, on the internet, on cable movie channels — familiarity may not always breed contempt, exactly, but it does tend to inspire complacency.
Art
Fondation Cartier at 30: Universalized Eclectic Global Art in Forward Motion
PARIS — This is a vision of a universalized eclectic global art in forward motion: a relational aesthetic that seems to hover over many exhibitions in France as a great correctness that cannot be questioned, only tampered with.
Art
Further Adventures in Mescaline
PARIS — Mind-blowing drugs are nothing new in French culture. Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir reported in The Prime of Life that Jean-Paul Sartre had a medically supervised mescaline injection in 1935, along with an unnamed intern.
Art
Lucio Fontana's Proto-Technologism
PARIS — If you want to leave all imagery behind for a free-fall into the immersive deep space of the virtual, Lucio Fontana is your quintessential man.
Art
Nancy Cunard's 'Black Atlantic'
PARIS — The display for Black Atlantic by Nancy Cunard at the Musée du quai Branly evokes a period when the artistic and literary avant-garde became intertwined with the political and the glamorous.
Art
The Lush Life of Virtual Architecture
PARIS — Jakob + Macfarlane’s drawings conceptually extol dandy artifice and knotted ambivalence while staying open to the breath of the voluptuous landscape.
Art
Tom Sachs's Pointless Americana
PARIS — In a search for art that reacts to the inequalities of globalization, must art lose touch with the sort of grace that exceeds the hand, a grace that couldn’t be anything but artificial and technological?
Art
Wade Guyton and the Post-Media Question
PARIS — A backshift in the Parisian weather, from spring warm sun to cold gray, complemented the opening of Wade Guyton’s back-titled 26 avril - 7 juin 2008 exhibition at Galerie Chantal Crousel perfectly.
Art
Arles Well That Ends Well
ARLES, France — It first looked to be cold, gray, and rainy on the first April weekend in Arles, somewhat in stride with the general dour spirit of the French these days.